Synopsis

Marking the 225th anniversary of loyalist landings in Canada, this important and comprehensive history is essential reading on the shaping of our country.

The few hundred loyalists who gathered at Roubalet’s Tavern in New York on the night of Saturday, November 16, 1782, shared a vision of the future intended to sustain them through the nightmare of the present. Abandoned by the king to whom they had promised their loyalty, unwelcome in the land that had so recently been theirs, they had no choice but to flee. But to where? And for what?

Their dream was to build a new and improved New York City. They would do this on the rocky shores of Roseway Bay, on the south coast of Nova Scotia, beside one of the best harbours in the world. The city would be cosmopolitan, but more refined, more royal, more loyal, and certainly more exclusive than the one they were now preparing to leave behind forever. At first, it seemed as if their dream would come true. Within the decade, however, Shelburne was a wasteland of abandoned homes and shops.

What happened? Plagued by drought, fires, and poor land quality, Shelburne’s fortunes quickly fell. Vividly told through the intertwined narratives of an eclectic collection of its early settlers, Loyalists and Layabouts is the fascinating story of Shelburne’s “rapid rise and faster fall.”

From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt

I am not now, nor ever have been an historian. By training, I’m a journalist; by inclination, a storyteller.

I knew from the beginning of this project that trying to translate the usual fragmentary, sometimes contradictory, often dubious details of the lives of ordinary people, all of them long dead, into a narrative that captured not only the reality of their lives but also the larger truth of how and why a 225-year-old city rose and fell within the historic blink of an eye–and do all of that without playing fast and loose with the known facts–was going to be challenging, and probably frustrating.

And it was.

As a journalist, I’m accustomed to writing about recent events. When I do that, I have the luxury of interviewing flesh-and-blood human beings. Later, if I can’t make sense of some sequence of events, or simply want to know more about an interesting incident that I’d missed or that they’d casually passed over the first time we talked, I simply pick up the telephone, call, and ask them.

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to ask the dearly departed to clarify or elaborate when you discover something in their life-on-paper that puzzles or confuses. You’re stuck with what you know and–just as importantly–what you don’t.

I still don’t know enough about the women of Shelburne, for example. When I began my research, I had hoped to discover a strong female character whose story could become part of this book. There undoubtedly were many of them in Shelburne. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the time to write about their experiences because they were too busy living them, or if they did, those diaries and letters have largely long since been lost to history.

During the course of my research, I came tantalizingly close on a couple of occasions to finding the female character I was seeking. Margaret Cowper-Fletcher-Watson-Cutt, for example, could have made a fascinating central character. She certainly lived an extraordinary life. In the mid-1770s, she and her two young children followed her soldier-husband from London across the ocean to America, where she witnessed his death in a revolutionary battle. Then both of her sons died. A few years later, she married again, to a man who’d been her late husband’s cellmate while they were prisoners of war. Margaret had two more children by him. In 1783, she and her second family became part of the historic exodus of refugees who sailed from New York to Shelburne. They’d barely begun to settle into their new lives when husband number two died, probably of a heart attack, leaving Margaret to fend for herself once again. Which she did by marrying a third time. That husband died too. Margaret, having had so little luck with husbands, eventually became an innkeeper in Shelburne. There is undoubtedly the makings of a novel in her Perils-of-Pauline life. But there aren’t enough letters, diaries, and accounts to make a full-fledged non-fiction narrative out of all those fascinating facts. I know. I tried.

Just as I did with Mary Swords, who was the mother of two young Shelburne printers. For more than a decade after the war, Mary relentlessly pressed her seemingly reasonable claims for compensation for her wartime losses, which included a husband and another son, as well as valuable property. No one listened. Despite that, she continued to be the most resolute and steadfast of Loyalists. Until she wasn’t. In 1795, she had a sudden and unexplained–and now inexplicable–change of heart and swore an oath of allegiance to the new United States of America.

Hannah Booth, the too-delicate wife of a British soldier stationed in Shelburne, also seemed at one point to be a candidate for principal-character status. But all I could find out about her came from her husband’s diaries and letters, written from his perspective. There is no written record to explain what was going on in her mind when the fates–and her husband’s superiors–dispatched them both to Shelburne.

These women do make cameo appearances, but I would have preferred to focus more on their personal narratives–if only I’d been able to find the details I needed.

That, of course, is the difficulty of writing non-fiction. And the reward, too.

The writer’s joy comes in those occasional aha moments when he discovers something unexpected, or suddenly connects the dots between seemingly disconnected events or characters.

During the course of my research, I did discover some incredibly rich and tellingly detailed first-person accounts of eighteenth-century life in the diaries and letters of a number of people who had called Shelburne home: Benjamin Marston, an acerbic surveyor who chronicled the town’s founding and first tumultuous year; William Booth, a British army captain who spent two melancholy years in Shelburne during its precipitous decline; and perhaps most intriguing, David George and Boston King, two former slaves who were central to the development of both Shelburne and Birchtown, the black loyalist community on Shelburne’s fringes. Their “slave narratives” offer another, quite different window to the story of the rise and fall of a loyalist town, as well as to black life in North America in the 1700s.

Their personal stories–and others, too–are the threads that interweave to tell the larger story of Shelburne. In many ways, the history of any place is the sum of the flesh-and-blood stories of those who lived it. During the period I’m writing about, Shelburne went through tumultuous, turbulent times. People came and went, oblivious to my narrative needs and desires. Benjamin Marston, who is such a central character in Shelburne’s founding and early days, for example, departs its stage forever after little more than a year, while William Booth, whose own diaries chronicle the town’s eventual demise, doesn’t begin his Shelburne sojourn until more than three years after the arrival of the first Loyalists.

Since I’ve chosen to tell the stories of these central characters as much as possible in narrative form, and usually from the point of view of the characters themselves, it’s certainly fair to ask whether I’m making anything up, or at least imposing my own notions of what these people must have been thinking at any particular time.

The short answer is no.

Charlotte Gray, one of Canada’s most respected writers of historical narrative non-fiction, put it this way in attempting to explain how she wrote Sisters in the Wilderness, her brilliant, bestselling account of the lives of two nineteenth-century English sisters in backwoods Ontario: “I don’t invent. But I take known facts, and imagine. . . . From the relatively little documentation available, I tried to read between the lines of those of their letters that have survived. I used my judgment in what to include and what to omit; what to emphasize and what to ignore; how to distill an untidy, sprawling mass of facts into a tidy package.”

Me too. Or at least that is my aim.

You can find at the beginning of the Endnotes an example of how I have developed my source material into a narrative. To maintain the narrative flow, I’ve consigned to those Endnotes most of the details of my sources. Through that section and the Bibliography, any reader should easily be able to discover the factual underpinning of what I’ve written. (Throughout the text, Roman numerals refer the reader to an endnote, while Arabic numerals refer to a footnote.)

Part of the fun of writing a book like this is in the occasionally rewarding “detective” work of trying to fill in the gaps in knowledge, or find the missing piece that will solve some puzzle or another. But there are still many gaps and puzzles, such as whatever happened to the mysterious Eliza, Benjamin Marston’s love interest during his early days in Halifax? Freshly widowed but clearly smitten, Benjamin wrote love poems to her and once confided in his diary that “the pleasure of again seeing that dear girl has abundantly rewarded me for all the disagreeable feelings of a ¬six-¬months’ imprisonment.” And then, nothing . . . Eliza suddenly disappears from the pages of his diary and, so far as we can tell, from his life, too. Did they have a falling out? Did she move away? Take up with another lover?

In a novel, it would be a simple enough matter to tie up that loose end with a plot twist; in the messier world of non-fiction, however, we’re bound by what we know–and don’t. That’s what makes it non-fiction.

Stephen KimberHalifax, September 2007

Prologue.

First, you had to meet with Joseph Durfee at his home on Water Street so he, and perhaps a few of the others, could personally vet you.i Not everyone was eligible to join their exclusive club of “loyalists associated for the purposes of removing and settling at Port Roseway in Nova Scotia,” as their articles of association described them. You needed to be a true Loyalist. And a proper British citizen. Which meant you couldn’t be a Jew; British law didn’t allow Jews to own land, and land was what this organization was all about. No one needed to inquire whether membership was open to the thousands of freed black slaves who’d also ended up in New York because of this American Revolution; it wasn’t. British promises of freedom were fine during wartime, but the war was ending and many of the members of this group had slaves of their own. They certainly didn’t want them getting the wrong ideas.

Once you had passed muster with Durfee and obtained your prized letter of recommendation–the other key needed to enter this exclusive club–you were eligible to attend a meeting. Tonight’s was being held at New York city hall at the corner of Broad and Wall streets.

It was November 30, 1782, yet another millstone-milestone day in the tumultuous seven-year war between England and her estranged American colonies. In Paris that day, British negotiators at the peace talks had formally agreed to recognize American independence. Communication being what it was then, the news wouldn’t officially reach New York for close to four months, but no one in tonight’s jostling, anxious, milling crowd of several hundred needed official notice. They knew. Which is why there were now so many more applying to join them that they’d had to move tonight’s gathering to city hall and even post a doorman to make sure only those with letters of recommendation got inside.

Previously, they’d gathered at Charles Roubalet’s tavern, a smoky establishment on Cortland Street near the Paulus Hook ferry that had become a favoured loyalist gathering place during these last few years of war. The refugees would meet to forget their troubles. They’d watch entertainers like the famous magician Isaac Levy, whose handbills boasted that the “hand is quicker than the eye.” Or they’d enjoy an evening of music–usually a three-hour musicale followed by dancing–at one of Roubalet’s regular Tuesday night public concerts. Whatever the entertainment on offer, of course, the real purpose of the gatherings was to give the dispirited Loyalists the chance to drink a few pints; puff on what Rivington’s Gazette, the popular loyalist newspaper, characterized as some “monstrous good smoking tobacco”; and complain, commiserate, and contemplate.

Although bands in many taverns, including Roubalet’s, still played “God Save the King” on the hour, and some among the Loyalists still optimistically toasted their shared dream of “a happy reinstatement of the loyal refugees,” most had finally become more realistic. The British had let them down, made a balls-up of the war strategy, ignored their advice and offers of help, and treated them . . . well, as if they were the enemy, too. And now they who had been so loyal had lost–or would soon lose–everything. Because they’d supported the wrong side, their homes, farms, land, businesses, careers, sometimes families, and, of course, country were gone.

Even those lucky enough to still have the resources to take care of themselves could no longer count on being able to buy what they needed in this teeming, overburdened city where what wasn’t in short supply was overpriced. Many once proud, successful, independent men had been reduced to subsisting on government largesse. By the time Sir Guy Carleton had arrived in the spring of 1782 to preside over this foregone conclusion, in fact, more than six thousand civilian men, women, and children were on the dole in New York.

New York was the last loyalist stronghold in the thirteen revolted colonies. After New York, what?

With the British army obviously preparing to depart and many former New Yorkers–rebels, patriots, winners to their losers–showing up to reclaim their abandoned homes and demand payments of past rent from the loyalist squatters, it was obvious they could not remain in New York much longer. Which invited the question, what was to become of them?

The Loyalists at Roubalet’s weren’t the only ones trying to answer that question. Loyalist societies had been spawned in taverns and pubs all over New York, their meetings often advertised in the newspapers with messages that hinted obliquely at “secret and important business [to] which all should attend.” Many of the gatherings were geographically based: Pennsylvania Loyalists, for example, gathered at Birkets Tavern near Maiden Lane, while those from Virginia met at the Queen’s Head, and Massachusetts refugees congregated at Hicks’ Tavern on Broadway. Some of these informal gatherings had evolved into associations, often the official successors to loyalist military organizations set up during the war. Others, including the group at Roubalet’s, had sprung up more recently and spontaneously, their members drawn from all of the rebellious colonies.

The Port Roseway Associates had had its beginnings the year before when a group oftwenty-¬six men–“chiefly of the number of those who, for their attachment to [the British] government and after numberless fatigues in support of the royal cause, have been obliged to quit their all and take refuge within the King’s lines”–met to launch a search for an “ideal Loyalist refugee township” where they could settle together after the war.

Their leader was Joseph Durfee, a former Newport sea captain and merchant who’d parlayed his valuable work piloting British vessels for General Clinton during the successful siege of Charles Town in May 1780–how long ago that seemed now!–into his current job as the director of vessels in New York Harbor. Others in the group came from almost all of the about-to-become United States: New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. And though they represented the spectrum of professions, crafts, and trades–there were seven merchants, four farmers, two carpenters, two tailors, a hat maker, a printer, a bookbinder, a doctor, a grocer, and a mariner among their number–¬they were, by and large, the good burghers of a suddenly bygone colonial America. That was deliberate. Their goal was to create a new and better New York–more exclusive, more sophisticated, more loyal than the one they were leaving behind.

About Stephen Kimber

Stephen Kimber is an award-winning writer, editor, and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel, Reparations, and five non-fiction books, including the bestselling Sailors, Slackers and Blind Pigs: Halifax at War.

He and his wife, Jeanie Kimber, live in Halifax.

Praise

Praise

“[A] thorough gallop through the town’s history, and a lovely romp it is. . . . A tale well told.” —The Globe and Mail

“[A] remarkable story. . . . Kimber provides a vivid portrait of men and women and their struggles to make their lives over are both comic and tragic. . . . He offers a fascinating might-have-been in the history of Canada.” —The Gazette (Montreal)

“Prodigious research, a dash of imagination and an engaging literary style make this a delightful and satisfying read and a serious contribution to Loyalist studies.” —James W. St.G. Walker, History Professor, University of Waterloo

"Canada is built on immigration, but immigration has rarely been easy on the immigrants. In Loyalists and Layabouts Stephen Kimber explores the immigrant dream gone spectacularly wrong: how 15,000 Americans flowed into Shelburne, Nova Scotia, in 1783 to build "the envy of the American states" — only to see their aspirations ebb away like the Nova Scotia tide." —Christopher Moore

"What a splendid tale, full of diverse and fascinating characters. It is also an overdue reminder of the price white Loyalists paid for the choice to remain impoverished but faithful subjects of George III. Black slaves paid an even higher price, gaining freedom at the cost of justice, equality or respect. No one who reads this book can ever again be comfortable with ancestral stereotypes."—Desmond Morton, Hiram Mills Professor of History, Emeritus, McGill University